Postdoctoral Research Associate

The Role

A 36-month fixed-term full time Postdoctoral Research Associate (PDRA) position is available at the Department of Psychology at Durham University. The successful candidate will join the research project Flexibility of predictive processing in scene viewing and representation. This project is led by Dr Sara Spotorno and funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

This project investigates how we use knowledge acquired from life experience (schemas) to predict what we should see and where we should see it in real-world scene (images of everyday environments). More specifically, it examines to what extent and how predictions about scenes can be updated when schemas are not useful for or are even interfering with the current task. To this purpose, it uses high precision eye-tracking to analyse the time course of attentional selection during scene viewing. The successful applicant will have primary responsibility for developing the experimental materials (carefully controlled scene images), programming the eye-tracking experiments, recruiting participants, collecting and analysing the eye-tracking data. They will also have the responsibility to write the studies up for publication and present the results at na tional and international scientific conferences. The project is, therefore, ideally suited for someone who is organised, is a clear communicator with excellent writing skills and has a solid experimental psychology training basis, although a background in cognitive neuroscience or computer science with experimental research experience may be appropriate as well. There is a technical aspect to the project in the production and evaluation of the experimental materials, so the person should have an aptitude for technical work. Moreover, there may be scope for the candidate to contribute to the project's development. Therefore, a combination of rigour and creativity in experimental design would be highly valued.

The successful candidate will have a strong academic track record, including experience in designing, carrying out, analysing and interpreting high quality quantitative research on human perception and/or cognition. Experience with any of the following topics and approaches will be a strong advantage:

• Real-world visual scene processing, including an understanding of algorithms that can be applied to scenes (e.g., visual salience algorithms).
• Eye tracking (especially using Eye Link eye trackers).
• Advanced statistical analysis skills, especially Linear Mixed Effect Models or Bayesian Models.
• Advance knowledge of experiment programming software, especially Matlab, Experimental Builder, PsychoPy, Python.
• Advanced knowledge of software for eye-tracking data extraction and analysis, esp. Matlab and R.

However, we do not necessarily expect candidates to have experience in all of these, and we can provide training as needed on those which are unfamiliar.

The funding is available from the 1^st July 2025

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